


Warble

by herrenjaller (orphan_account)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Blindness, Established Relationship, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Light Angst, M/M, Muteness, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 17:46:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13253397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/herrenjaller
Summary: In the first year of the starscourge, Ignis stopped speaking.A year out from its lifting, Gladio and Ignis spend a moment reflecting. They've had the harder talks already, but there's just the final question of why.





	Warble

**Author's Note:**

> Lot of bird-based titles rolling around in my noggin lately. Whoops ㄟ( ･ө･ )ㄏ

“It hadn’t occurred to me until now that the birds had stopped singing.”

“There was that one at the post?“

“She was sick and half-dead. You got a scar from her, if I recall.” Ignis pushed away from the window. The sunlight stretched to follow him past their curtains. In the turn of a year, he’d put on some weight that brought a smoothness back to his cheeks and his jaw. There was no sallow or yellow about him anymore. The scattering of freckles and moles across his face, his neck, that triangle of chest he left bare despite himself, were dark again. On warm days, he’d come home with a bronze flush high on his cheeks. The scars of his boyhood acne were softer. The burn of scars across his face were paler. Less puckered. And Ignis didn’t trace them when he thought anymore. His fingers had lost their fascination for the foreign topography. He knew them now, and their tether to the Lucis line was a more rose-touched one.

He padded, barefoot, across their sitting area. Easing himself onto the couch, he ran his hand along the cushion-back until he found Gladio’s. Gladio was quick to knit their fingers together, to pull Ignis forward into his lap.

Ignis traced a finger up the heart of Gladio’s palm. “ _There_ it is. I also recall telling you-“

“To wear gloves. And I did,” Gladio chuckled under his breath. His lips ghosted Ignis’s brow. “She cut through ‘em. Not my fault. I was trying to help untie her.”

Ignis pulled their hands from behind the couch, his shoulder popping as he did. “The birds, all of the birds, stopped singing. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it.” His finger smoothed over the scar. Back and forth, and back again. He felt Gladio’s eyes on him, heard and felt his breath fanning against his cheek. An inch closer and Ignis would feel the brush of his eyelashes. “Imagine a life like that. Ten years without speaking. A year without speaking.”

Gladio’s palm slicked with cold in his hands. “I can imagine, yeah.” He sat back, and the warmth that had coiled in the air between them snapped with chill. “Is this,” Gladio ran his tongue across his bottom lip. He started again, “Is this something you’re ready to talk about?”

Ignis raised a brow, but didn’t turn his eyes to him. There was some pigment in his irises now, the faintest shift of green, like the pebbles of sea glass they’d found at Galdin Quay. Gladio was still a shadow. Ignis’s vision hadn’t returned, and had improved only by bare degrees. That might’ve been linked to time, or to health, or to the return of the sun after a decade of unceasing, endless dark and winter. On a good day, with warm, good light, he could make out a hue of amber to the world, or a small haze of green. It was unfocused, and it was fleeting.

“I’m the one bringing it up, Gladio.”

“To be fair, last time you brought it up, we were both drunk.”

Ignis clicked his tongue. “Fair. But it’s before noon, and I trust you didn’t somehow find yourself drinking that entire bottle of wine on the shelf before I woke.”

“You woke up before me.”

“Then my point stands.”

“This is your territory, Iggy. You stopped talking. We came back from Gralea and you were,” Gladio settled his hand on his knee. He fingered a tear in his pants. “You were gone.”

Ignis drew his legs up under himself, pulled the blanket they kept along the back of the couch down across his shoulders. He hunched. His hair was untouched, soft across his brow still. It brushed at his nape and the corners of his jaw. He looked small and cold. He felt Gladio lean forward into his space. Rough fingers skimmed up either side of Ignis’s throat, and then Gladio was pulling him close to kiss the space between his brows.

Gladio whispered against his skin, “I don’t want an apology. We’ve been through that a hundred times. Just want to know what happened. What I could have done.”

“You,” Ignis pulled back, “couldn’t have done a thing.”

“That’s not true.”

“Gladio.” Ignis turned his face into the heart of Gladio’s palm. He kissed the thin scar a bird beak had knit into the skin. “Noct was gone. I had no idea of when he’d return. _If_ he’d return.” The world was dark, and it had spun darker as Noctis slept, labored, cleansed. “Smoking’s an awful habit neither of our bodies can afford, and drinking-“

“A caffeine addiction counts, you know.”

Ignis chuckled. “You interrupt me.”

“Always.”

“Drinking, I was saying, would have only made the issue at hand worse.”

“The issue at hand being...?”

Ignis let loose a long, deep sigh. He took Gladio by his wrists and took his handsbetween his own. He pressed his thumbs between Gladio’s knuckles. “Your skin’s dry.” The clock on their bookshelf ticked. In the quiet, the birdsongs filtered through the window. Trucks thrummed down on the street. There was the knock and commotion of the daily wreckage clearance, streets away. Workers called to each other as late-morning shipments were trundled in. Insomnia had some breath in her again. “You were angry. Noct was gone. Prompto was still so fragile after Astrals know what they did to him. And I was...disgusted and lost.” Gladio waited. “You know what it was like.”

“Messing up the one thing they bred and trained you for?”

“You aren’t a dog, Gladiolus.”

“ _Oh!_ He whips out the full name.” Gladio knocked their noses in his giggling when Ignis scoffed at him. He nudged him in the ribs with an elbow.

“But yes. _Messing_ up the one thing you knew how to do. I’d lost my axis, and it was frightening- petrifying. The usual vices that one might use to cope didn’t appeal. It was easier to be quiet awhile.”

“And then?”

“And then it was habit. There was little to be done, and so little I could say. It was better to relearn my hand to writing. Half the people who saw I was blind responded by speaking louder, Gladio.” He was laughing now as he spoke, head tipped to rest against the couch-back. “If I were to evaluate it now, I’d say it was a harm reduction. It was hardly ideal, but I fear if I’d spoken much more than I did, if I’d let you in alongside me, I might have destroyed everything.”

“Ignis.”

“It’s over, Gladiolus. I’m fine. No more promises and apologies for something ten years gone. Please. I’d like only, for a long while, to look forward.”

Gladio drew the blanket tighter on Ignis’s shoulders, and then he pulled him forward into a heap in his lap. He tucked Ignis’s head under his chin. Ignis couldn’t see the cues anymore. He couldn’t rely on the furrow of Gladio’s brows or the set to his jaw, but he could hear his breath. It was slow, and it was even. He pressed his ear to Gladio’s skin, heard the rush of blood and a deep, drumming beat to his heart. When Gladio spoke, his voice rumbled through his chest, “I was worried this was going to turn into one of those floor talks. Where we end up exhausted. Crying like we’re eighteen again.”

“Well, the floor isn’t moving. Give me some motivation, I’m sure I can get the tears worked up.” Gladio snorted. He rubbed lazy circles into Ignis’s shoulder.

“Think we can do without?”

“I think we can do without, yes.”

**Author's Note:**

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